AMD Goes Forward With New Naming Scheme

Leslie Sobon, director of product management at AMD,
declared today that AMD is making preparations to change its current processor
naming scheme. AMD’s new naming scheme combines two letters with four digits.
The first letter indicates the grade of the product. For instance, G class is
top of the line material, B class is intermediate, and L is considered value
class. The second letter conveys power consumption, in which P class products
consume more than 65W, S class consume approximately 65W of power, and E class
consume less than 65W of power.

“The first digit of the proceeding four-digit number will
indicate the product family; 1000 represents Sempron/Athlon single-core, 2000
represents Athlon dual-core, 6000 represents Phenom dual-core and 7000 represents
Phenom quad-core. The second digit indicates relative core frequencies within
the product family while the two remaining digits will be used for the future
upgrade functions.”

Sobon explains that AMD decided to eliminate the “64”
from its naming scheme in order to keep
things simple. The new scheme has already started to take effect, notably with
the introduction of the Athlon X2 BE-2350 and BE-2300 processors. The
transition from AMD’s current naming scheme to its new scheme is expected to
take six months to complete. If you ask us, it seems to be even more
complicated than before.